"Colourless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... become a trite saying that French genius lacks the sense of Nature, that the French tongue is colourless, and therefore wants the most striking feature of poetry. If we abandoned for one moment the domain of letters and took a comprehensive view of the field of art, we might be permitted to express astonishment at the passing of so summary a ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... addressed, whom I understood to be the grandmother, was engaged in scrubbing with a duster a deal table already clean enough to make Bill's face much ashamed of itself. She was a large heavy old woman, with a round colourless visage that suggested the full moon by daylight, and wispy grey locks ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... the close clinging embrace in which Regina held her, a ghastly smile parted Olga's colourless lips, and she said said in a ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... honey the surrounding world affords. But if the queen-impulse dies, the death-dealing influence, though retarded a little by habit, spreads slowly through all the subsidiary impulses, and a whole tract of life becomes inexplicably colourless. What was formerly full of zest, and so obviously worth doing that it raised no questions, has now grown dreary and purposeless: with a sense of disillusion we inquire the meaning of life, and decide, perhaps, that all is vanity. The search for ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... usually make this voyage twice a year. The ships from Pegu bring the most precious jewels, as rubies and diamonds; but their principal lading is rice and certain cloths. Those from Tanaserim are chiefly freighted with rice and Nipar wine, which is very strong, and as colourless as rock water, with a somewhat whitish tinge, and very hot in taste, like aqua vitae.[22] We came to anchor at Punta Galle, in foul ground, so that we lay all that night a-drift, having only two anchors left, which were in the hold, and had no stocks. Upon this our men took occasion to insist ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... had applied a hair line of the strong, colourless gum to the inside of the envelope and had united the edges under pressure between the two pieces of wood. As soon as it was dry he excused himself again and went back to the office, where he managed to secure an opportunity to stick the letter back in the box ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... at all events,"—and then follows an expression in which this ancient Critic is observed ingeniously to accommodate his language to the phenomenon which he has to describe, so as covertly to insinuate something else. Eusebius employs an idiom (it is found elsewhere in his writings) sufficiently colourless to have hitherto failed to arouse attention; but of which it is impossible to overlook the actual design and import, after all that has gone before. He clearly recognises the very phenomenon to which ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... cannon of a beleaguered city) usefully booming outside on the dogmatic ramparts; and meanwhile, within and out of shot, dwelt in her private garden which she watered with grateful tears. It seems strange to say of this colourless and ineffectual woman, but she was a true enthusiast, and might have made the sunshine and the glory of a cloister. Perhaps none but Archie knew she could be eloquent; perhaps none but he had seen ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... needs fling it all aside with such bitter anger and harsh regret when the thunderbolt fell and the searching dart stabbed him awake? Outraged, hurt-maddened, he had flung away, as he believed, to outer darkness, and to a joyless, purposeless, colourless life. ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... of youth, and took stock of my equipment as if I were casting up an account. Many a time in those days I studied my appearance in the glass like a foolish maid. I was not well featured, having a freckled, square face, a biggish head, a blunt nose, grey, colourless eyes, and a sandy thatch of hair, I had great square shoulders, but my arms were too short for my stature, and—from an accident in my nursing days—of indifferent strength. All this stood on the debit ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... on the colourless grass of the pasture land, we had to work round the Kolla fiord, a longer way but an easier one than across that inlet. We soon entered into a 'pingstar' or parish called Ejulberg, from whose steeple twelve o'clock would have struck, if Icelandic churches were rich enough to ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... sandbanks this first day are undoubtedly suggestive of the Nile, but the Irrawaddy is wider; the sand edge falls in the same kind of chunks; the Nile is silvery and blue, with colourless shadows, here everywhere rainbow tints spread out most delicately, and here instead of Egyptians in floppy robes you have refined people exquisitely dressed. As the river is low, we do not see much beyond the ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... clinging to you that last morning when we said our good-byes. We have enough knowledge about you and your world to interpret all the details you can give us. But our words about our own home doings would be very vague and colourless to you. You must always imagine us coming to see you and wanting to know as much about you as we can, and like a charming hostess gratify that want. I must thank you for the account of Cavour in ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... wonderful appearance had risen to her feet and was looking eagerly towards him. She was wearing the plain black dress of a working woman, whose clumsy folds inadequately concealed a figure of singular beauty and strength. Her cheeks were colourless; her eyes large and deep, and of a soft shade of grey, filled just now with the half wondering, half worshipping expression of a pilgrim who has reached the Mecca of her desires. Her hair—her shabby hat lay upon ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had a passion for instance for open-air speaking, but was not thought on the whole to excel in it unless he could help himself out with a hymn. In conversation he kept his eyes on you with a kind of colourless candour, as if he had not understood what you were saying and, in a fashion that made many people turn red, waited before answering. This was only because he was considering their remarks in more relations ...
— The Chaperon • Henry James
... to devise a new attitude each time. Now this had grown wearisome to him. His brain was tired with planning and thinking. It was out of his power; his fashionable life bore him far away from labour and thought. His work grew cold and colourless; and he betook himself with indifference to the reproduction of monotonous, well-worn forms. The eternally spick-and-span uniforms, and the so-to-speak buttoned-up faces of the government officials, soldiers, and statesmen, did not offer a wide field for his brush: it forgot ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... the breath of thought and feeling as a field of flowers when the west wind blows, was now set, as though for ever, in a death-like fixity. The delicate features were drawn and pinched, the nostrils contracted, the colourless lips straightened out of the lines of beauty into the mould of a lifeless mask. It was the face of a dead woman, but it was her face still, and the Wanderer knew it well; in the kingdom of his soul the ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... to sweep with the point of a hair-pencil. Let us have patience and do our sweeping gently; and we shall be able to separate from the main body the fragments of a sort of extremely fine satin. This transparent, colourless material is the upholstery that keeps out the wet. The Spider's web, if it formed a stuff and not a net, is the only thing that could be ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... however that he remained during this period in a cave, where his mother conveyed to him intelligence and necessaries, and that, when he came once more into light and air, he appeared so emaciated and colourless, that he might well be believed to have come ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... lines on the pages That sundered mine eyes and the flowers Wax faint as the shadows of ages That sunder their season and ours; As the ghosts of the centuries that sever A season of colourless time From the days whose remembrance is ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... close to a glacis of smooth blue mud which sloped up to a weed-grown dyke; behind lay the same flat country, colourless, humid; and opposite us, two miles away, scarcely visible in the deepening twilight, ran the outline of a similar shore. Between rolled the turgid Elbe. 'The Styx flowing through Tartarus,' I thought to myself, recalling some ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... owned, described Julius as remarkably ugly. But he did not strike Katherine thus. His heavy black hair, beardless face and sallow skin—rendered dull and colourless, his features thickened, though not actually scarred, by smallpox, which he had had as a child,—his sensitive mouth, and the questioning expression of his short-sighted brown eyes, reminded her of a fifteenth-century Florentine portrait that ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... sapphires, through pale rubies, brilliant yellow, and crystalline white. The gloom was relieved beyond the transepts near the altar. Even in the centre of the cross the sun pierced clearer glass, less storied with figures, and bordered with almost colourless panes that admitted ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... turning to carry the letters upstairs when she heard the opening of the outer door, and her aunt entered the drawing-room. Mrs. Peniston was a small plump woman, with a colourless skin lined with trivial wrinkles. Her grey hair was arranged with precision, and her clothes looked excessively new and yet slightly old-fashioned. They were always black and tightly fitting, with an expensive glitter: she was the kind of woman who ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... nickering, perfunctory smile. From time to time, with an air of casting fear behind him and dashing into the imminent, deadly breach, he would hazard an 'Ah, oui,' or a 'Pas mal.' For the rest, he played the piano prettily enough, wrote colourless, correct French verse, and was reputed to be an industrious if not a brilliant student—what we called ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... the company about his grave; but I confess the spectacle had an ugly side for me; and I was glad to step forward and raise my eyes to where the Castle and the roofs of the Old Town, and the spire of the Assembly Hall, stood deployed against the sky with the colourless precision of engraving. An open outlook is to be desired from a churchyard, and a sight of the sky and some of the world's beauty relieves ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... out disregarding it, and after going a few yards regained the command of his legs. He sucked an orange as he walked. It was a colourless and pellucid dawn. The wood of pines detached its columns of brown trunks and its dark-green canopy very clearly against the rocks of the gray hillside behind. He kept his eyes fixed on it steadily. That temperamental, good-humoured coolness in the face of danger, which ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... colourless and lifeless—sort of plastic stuff—until we get hold of them. We twist them to the best shapes we can. Nothing happens to us that isn't exactly like ourselves. Even what people call accidents. Even a man's diseases. I've seen that in the Wards. ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... from its supposed nature it should. They find themselves powerless to pass any general judgment, or to extend the law they live by to any beyond themselves. The whole prospect that environs them has become morally colourless; and they discern in their attitude towards the world without, what it must one day come to be towards the world within. A state of mind like this is no dream. It is a malady of the modern world—a malady of our own generation, which can escape no eyes that will look for it. It ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... fear, joy, and excitement of the fighting men out there in the searchlights and the dull anguish of waiting here in the darkness; imagining horrors; praying the Almighty our men may be vouchsafed valour to stick it through the night; wondering, waiting until the wire brings its colourless message! ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... pleasantly, and, passing out to the street, stepped into the waiting carriage and was driven home. It wanted a few minutes to midnight when she stole from the veranda door of her room once more, dressed in her dim, straight gown of moonlight velvet with a swathe of colourless veil about her head and, sliding softly through the garden, went out into the quiet streets of the town until she came, at last, to a little indistinguished door next to a jeweller's window, whereon was neatly inscribed the name, "Syke Ravenal." ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... of persuasion. He appeals not to our sense of greatness and power in a teacher, which is noble, but to our love of finding and embracing truth for ourselves, which is still nobler. People who like their teacher to be as a king publishing decrees with herald and trumpet, perhaps find Mr. Mill colourless. Yet this habitual effacement of his own personality marked a delicate and very rare shade in his reverence for ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... quarry. It was quite dark, in among the trees. I made the circuit of the copse, whistling softly my three bars of "Lillibulero." Then I plunged into it. The bracken underfoot rustled and rustled. I came to a halt. A little bar of light lay on the horizon in front of me, almost colourless. It was crossed again and again by the small fir-trunks that were little more than wands. A woodpigeon rose with a sudden crash of sound, flapping away against the branches. My pulse was dancing with delight—my heart, too. It was like a game of hide-and-seek, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... and seemed to be afraid that variety of employment would distract his attention. So he went on from week to week, and month to month, preparing his mind for usefulness, but his body for the grave. His pale brow grew yet paler, his cheek hollow, and his hand thin and colourless, but still he declared himself to be in perfect health, and no one ...
— Effie Maurice - Or What do I Love Best • Fanny Forester
... an incredible number of fibres or white lines. Touching them, the cloudy substance would turn or close, first on one side, then on the other, very gracefully, but when I took one of them up in the ladle, with which I heaved the water out of the boat, it appeared only a colourless jelly. ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... comprehension of Nature. But the contradiction is easily explained. The study of Nature, as it was carried on in the Renaissance, comprised the study of effects which had remained unnoticed by antiquity; and the study of the statue, colourless, without light, shade, or perspective, interfered with, and was interfered with by, the study of colour, of light and shade, of perspective, and of all that a generation of painters would seek to learn from Nature. Nor was this all; the influence ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... Mr. Bucket had looked down. The sun was low—near setting—and its light came redly in above, without descending to the ground. Upon a plain canvas-covered sofa lay the man from Shropshire, dressed much as we had seen him last, but so changed that at first I recognized no likeness in his colourless face to ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... unless, as I often think, he really——" she stopped suddenly, frowning at herself. "This dreariness is not our desert," she explained eagerly to the girl, as the horses dragged the carriage over the sandy earth, through whose hard brown surface the harsh, colourless blades of drinn pricked like a few sparse hairs on the head of a shrivelled old man. "In the Sahara, there are four kinds of desert, because Allah put four angels in charge, giving each his own portion. The Angel of the Chebka was cold of nature, with no kindness in his ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... is singing by the pond, And all about him stars have burst in bloom, A colonnade stands pallidly beyond, And beneath that a solitary tomb. Who lies within that tomb I do not know, The yellow bird intones his threnody In notes as colourless as driven snow, Clashing with the green ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... of my life,' and so on, without a syllable about anything except the purely earthly view of life. Of course, when you shut out God, the past is all dark enough, grey and dismal, like the landscape on some cloudy day, where the woods stand black, and the rivers creep melancholy through colourless fields, and the sky is grey and formless above. Let the sun come out, and the river flashes into a golden mirror, and the woods are alive with twinkling lights and shadows, and the sky stretches a blue pavilion above them, and all the birds sing. Let God into your life, and its ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Robinson himself, Moll, Jack, William the Quaker in Singleton, even Roxana the cold-blooded and covetous courtesan, cannot be said not to be real—they and almost every one of the minorities are an immense advance on the colourless and bloodless ticketed puppets of the Middle Fiction. But they still want something—the snap of the fingers of the artist. Moll is perhaps the most real of all of them and yet one has no flash-sights of ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... suddenly leaping backwards into the black wood, he drew from his tunic a phial of colourless liquid which he threw in the face of his father's slayer as he disappeared behind the inky curtain of the night. The Comte died without utterance, and was buried the next day, but little more than two and thirty years from the hour of his birth. No trace ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... death, too, in this cold, mournful water, and in the silence that hung about it, and in some vague way it reminded Emily of her own life. She had known little else but death; her life seemed full of death; and those reflections, so distinct and so colourless, were like death. ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... from his stool. His face was almost colourless, but for two bright red spots, the size of quarters, beneath either cheek-bone. He was half a head shorter than the shipping clerk, and apparently about half as wide; but there was sincerity in his manner and an ominous snap in the unflinching ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... flowers have almost certainly become more or less completely peloric through reversion. Corydalis tuberosa properly has one of its two nectaries colourless, destitute of nectar, only half the size of the other, and {59} therefore, to a certain extent, in a rudimentary state; the pistil is curved towards the perfect nectary, and the hood, formed of the inner petals, slips off the pistil and stamens in one direction ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... laughter had subsided another man entered the room. He was, perhaps, nearer thirty than twenty, and the face under his dull, colourless hair was singularly pale, but there was promise of great strength ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... from the detailed characteristics of one part of our experience to what is beyond our experience; if, for instance {23} (I am here replying to an objection of Hoeffding's), a blind man were to argue that the world must be colourless because he sees no colour, or if any of us were to affirm that in other planets there can be no colours but what we see, no sensations but what we feel, no mental powers but what we possess, the ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... the virtuous action is worth. But that only means that the character must be so balanced as to give due weight to each motive; not that we can abstract from character altogether, as though human beings could be mere colourless and uniform ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... a long, strong, colourless voice quavered in her young throat. She delivered the lines of Clorinde in the admired interview with Celie, the gem of the third act, with a rude monotony, and then, gaining confidence, with an effort at modulation which was ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... to a cyst filled with a clear colourless jelly or colloid material, met with in the vicinity of a joint or ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... oblique eyes follow me as I go. And something like a feeling of remorse seizes me at thus abruptly abandoning the void, dusty, crumbling temple, with its mirrorless altar and its colourless lanterns, and the decaying sculptures of its neglected court, and its kindly guardian whom I see still watching my retreating steps, with the yellow kakemono in his hand. The whistle of a locomotive warns me that I shall just have time to catch the train. For Western civilisation has ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... hair hung down on either side of her colourless face, from which beamed forth a pair of wild eyes, glowing with the fire of madness. Her dress being of the same sombre hue as was everything in the hut, had as Algernon entered prevented him from observing her till she turned her face ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... simplest drop of water, in itself, and apart from its mechanical relations to other matter, is really a very complex and a very wonderful thing; not at all likely to be "self-caused." Water is made up, we know, of oxygen and hydrogen—two elementary colourless, formless gases. Now we can easily divide the one drop into two, and, without any great difficulty, the two into four, and (perhaps with the aid of a magnifying glass) the four into eight, and so on, as long as the minute particle still ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... a chef, Virubov was for ever hitching up breeches which had slipped from a stomach ruined with surfeits of watermelon. And always were his fat lips parted as though athirst, and perpetually had he in his colourless eyes an expression of ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... when the colours were utterly changed by looking through stained glass, and unchanged also when the colouring was reduced to the barest monochrome of a photograph or a pencil drawing; nay remained the same despite all changes of scale in that almost colourless presentment of them. Those items of the aspect were, as we all know, Shapes. And with altered colours, and colours diminished to just enough for each line to detach itself from its ground, those Shapes could ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... snowdrops come up with their bowed heads, as if full of the memory of the fierce winds they encountered last spring, and yet ready in the strength of their weakness to encounter them again. Up comes the crocus, bringing its gold safe from the dark of its colourless grave into the light of its parent gold. Primroses, and anemones, and blue-bells, and a thousand other children of the spring, hear the resurrection-trumpet of the wind from the west and south, obey, and leave their graves behind to breathe the air of the sweet heavens. Up and ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... and plain she was not. Without beauty of feature or elegance of form, she pleased. Without youth and its gay graces, she cheered. One never tired of seeing her: she was never monotonous, or insipid, or colourless, or flat. Her unfaded hair, her eye with its temperate blue light, her cheek with its wholesome fruit-like bloom—these things pleased in moderation, but ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... in a smooth, colourless voice, "I have the honour to be the Royal Introducing Chamberlain. In approaching the queen, do as I shall direct. First, before advancing to the dais bow slightly; then at the foot of the ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... excuse for his insistence on this point, for in a superficial way Romer was very effective, fair and good-looking, well-made and distinguished; but the entire absence of all expression from his empty, regular face, and of all animation from his dry, colourless voice and manner, soon counteracted the effectiveness. Valentia often said that Romer should never do more than walk through a room or look in for a few minutes where there were other people—even at a ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... Turkestan and Yuennan has already been mentioned; also the retrocession of Kuldja, which brings us down to the year 1881, when the Eastern Empress died. Death must have been more or less a relief to this colourless personage, who had been entirely superseded on a stage on which by rights she should have played the leading part, and who had been terrorized during her last years by ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... the dawn was already beginning. The hollow of the sky was full of essential daylight, colourless and clean; and the valley underneath was flooded with a grey reflection. A few thin vapours clung in the coves of the forest or lay along the winding course of the river. The scene disengaged a surprising effect of stillness, which was hardly interrupted when the cocks began once ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ridge, beheld the Channel traffic—full-sailed to that fair breeze—all about us, and swung slantwise, light as a bladder, elastic as a basket, into the next furrow. Then the sun found us, struck the wet gray bows to living, leaping opal, the colourless deep to hard sapphire, the many sails to pearl, and the little steam-plume of our escape to an ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... the result of this home education, and already bid fair to follow in his parent's footsteps. Christian virtues are certainly not incompatible with manliness, but the practice of them as maintained by Prince Montevarchi had made his son Ascanio a colourless creature, rather non-bad than good, clothed in a garment of righteousness that fitted him only because his harmless soul had no salient bosses of goodness, any more than it was disfigured by any reprehensible depressions capable ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... feet touched the ground and headed by Omar, we all rushed towards him. He was a very tall, loosely-built man, his complexion almost white with just a yellowish tinge, colourless lips, colourless drab hair; vague irregular features, with an entire absence of expression. He wore an Arab haick upon his head bound with many yards of brown camel's hair, a long white garment, something like a burnouse, only embroidered at the edge with crimson thread and confined ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... which grew on a lean, plucked neck like that of an old fowl, had brought his face into the light. It was long, and run to seed, and had a large, red nose; its thin, colourless lips were twisted sideways and apart, showing his semi-toothless mouth; and his eyes had that aged look of eyes in which all colour runs into a thin rim round the iris; and over them kept coming films ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... again. The great wealth of her hair looked very dark above her colourless face. She raised her eyes, glistening softly in the light with a sort of unreadable appeal, with a strange effect of ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... frocks," Jeannette declared, pointing to them where Susette had spread them out upon the bed, "are just colourless baby ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... the length of Webbe's, dealing with a large number of questions subsidiary to Ars Poetica, and containing no few selections of illustrative verse, many of the author's own. As far as style goes both Webbe and Puttenham fall into the rather colourless but not incorrect class already described, and are of the tribe of Ascham. Here is ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... slowly. There came a knock at the door, and she opened it to an old man with a frame so attenuated that it appeared to be absolutely fleshless. His hair was white and almost touching his shoulders, and his face so colourless and immobile that it looked as if it were composed of wax; but the dark eyes under the white, shaggy brows were full of life, ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... down beside the stone, and peeped into the gaping cranny. There he encountered merely the tiny, pale-green, faintly conspicuous eyes of a large spider, confronting his own. It was for the moment an alarming, and yet a faintly fascinating experience. The little almost colourless fires remained so changeless. But still, even when at last they had actually vanished into the recesses of that quiet habitation, Lawford did not rise from his knees. An utterly unreasonable feeling of dismay, a sudden weakness and ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... chamber was dimly lighted by a lamp turned low. By the bedside sat Grace, wrapped in a shawl; on the pillow lay the white face of Agnes Darling, calm in her slumber, but colourless as the ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... past a great funeral of some king going to his own country, not as he had hoped to go, but stiff and colourless, spices filling up the ...
— The Hollow Land • William Morris
... across his forehead, which was intensely white, and beaded with moisture, though his face retained a healthy glow. But Faxon's gaze remained fastened to the hand he had uncovered: it was so long, so colourless, so wasted, so much older than the brow he ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... which had the merit of appearing neither brilliant nor remarkable as eyes merely, but which held in their luminous depths that intellectual command which represents the active and passionate life of the brain, beside which all other life is poor and colourless. These eyes appeared to rest upon him now from under their drooping sleepy white eyelids with an inexpressible tenderness and fascination, and he was suddenly reminded of Heinrich Heine's quaint love-fancy; "Behind her dreaming ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... influence of the waves, was covered in places with shells, the inhabitants of which had perished when the waters gradually dried away. There lay mixed with these some skeletons of fishes; here a huge heap, and there small bones which looked less terrible; and masses of sea-weed, dried and colourless, under which, as it seemed, the creeping things of the ocean had sheltered for a while, and some had crawled to the surface when about to perish. But it was not only the brute creation which had died here: there was in the middle a pile of rocks, on one side of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... spring and of mere pleasure in existence have alternated with days of gloom and loneliness, of melancholy, of resignation. Our mental pictures of the place are tinged by many moods, as the landscape is beheld in shower and sunshine, in frost, and in the colourless drizzling weather. Oxford, that once seemed a pleasant porch and entrance into life, may become a dingy ante-room, where we kick our heels with other weary, waiting people. At last, if men linger there too late, Oxford grows a prison, and it is the final condition of the loiterer to take "this for ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... eighteenth century, however, a change came. The age was a critical age—an age of prose and common sense; the rhetorical impulse faded away, to find expression only in melodramatic tragedy and dull verse; and the style of Voltaire, so brilliant and yet so colourless, so limited and yet so infinitely sensible, symbolized the literary character of the century. The Romantic Movement was an immense reaction against the realism which had come to such perfection in the acid prose of Voltaire. It was a reassertion of ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... could not utter a word; she held out to him her hand, she looked at him with gentleness and kindness, but tears started into her eyes, and trickled in large drops down her colourless cheeks. ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... spread out with the trowel, it remained still colourless, but after it had undergone the process of pressing, which generally took place immediately before sponging, it presented to the astonished workmen the appearance of one sheet of gold; and when it had been exposed to the sun, it acquired the highest ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... for any signs of going to sea—an increasing volume of smoke from the funnels, activity on the bridge or more than an ordinary display of signal flags. But there was nothing to bring lasting satisfaction and the grey day ended with a colourless sunset. Towards midnight a tender bumped alongside, men shouted in the dark and packages were dropped with thuds ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... brick-built houses with slate roofs, at the edge of a large mining village in Staffordshire. The houses are dingy and colourless, and without relief of any kind. So are those in the next row, so in the street beyond, and throughout the whole village. There is a dreary monotony about the place; and if some giant could come and pick up all the rows of houses, and change their places ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... beautiful to her, the straight, powerful nape of the neck, the delicate shape of the back of the head, the black hair. The way the neck sprang from the strong, loose shoulders was beautiful. There was something mindless but intent about the forward reach of his head. His face seemed colourless, neutral-tinted ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... with him, rose and stepped across the strip of grass to her side, and, glancing askance at her, was on the point of speaking when he discovered that her eyes were shut and her face colourless ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... was apparently very young, and had a tall graceful figure, and strange colourless hair that looked as though it ought to have been golden, only the gloss had faded out of it; but it was lovely hair, fine and soft as ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... this expression of feeling on a colourless telegraph form, and as she was, at Knightsbridge, unable to hear the ironical tone of the ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... fathering of little Prudence was a work by no means colourless or uneventful. The child had displayed a grievous capacity for remaining unimpressed by even the best-weighed opinions of her protector. She was also appallingly fluent in and partial to the idioms and metaphors of revealed religion,—a circumstance that ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... lay in the ancient and tattered bed which not even the activities of Mme. Poussette could render more than moderately decent. The sands of life were running out indeed; a great change was apparent in his pinched and freckled features, and his small colourless eyes had sunk entirely back into his head. Two large cats slept at his feet and three more lay under the bed; despite all madame could do to remove them, these five out of the fourteen persisted ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... desire, thou wouldst be my helper; I am no longer afraid of thy presence, and I am no longer regardless of instruction." As he uttered these words, the figure of the White Maiden grew gradually as distinct as it had been at first; and what had well-nigh faded into an ill-defined and colourless shadow, again assumed an appearance at least of corporeal consistency, although the hues were less vivid, and the outline of the figure less distinct and defined—so at least it seemed to Halbert—than those of an ordinary inhabitant of earth. "Wilt thou grant my request," he said, ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... my table, "you shall hear the latest beautiful thing and bold, said by our great Henry—'capable de tout,' beside whom 'ce coquin d'Habacuc' was mild indeed and usual!" And straightway to my stultification, I find myself translating paragraphs of pathos and indignation, in which a colourless old gentleman of the Academy is sympathized with, and made a doddering hero of, for no better reason than that he is old—and those who would point out the wisdom and comfort of his withdrawal into the wigwam of private life, sternly reproved and anathematized ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... to better his position, wishing to have an individuality of his own in her regard; but he could not change the colourless role which she assigned him. So he became silent, speaking only when some remark was obviously intended for him, and watched her face and expression. He had always told himself that her dominant characteristic was strength, power of will, ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... before Dam's starting, staring eyes, fastened to the white back of the tall glass box, and immersed in colourless liquid was the Terror. ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... pieces of glass, and expose them to the fire, to ascertain if the desired tone of colour is produced. The artist must be guided by these proof pieces in using his colours. The proper glass for receiving these colours should be uniform, colourless, and difficult of fusion. For this reason crown glass made with a little alkali or kelp is preferred. A design must be drawn upon paper and placed beneath the plate of glass. The upper side of the glass being sponged over with gum-water affords, ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... privilege and strange experience that surrounded the Wards; they mixed, to the great sharpening of the edge of their wit, in the wild life of the people, beside which the life at Mr. Pulling Jenks's and even at the Institution Vergnes was colourless and commonplace. Somehow they were of the people, and still were full of family forms—which seemed, one dimly made out through the false perspective of all the cousinships, the stronger and clearer note of New England; the note that had already determined ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... remained but the two officials, the accused, the accuser, and Miles Hendon. This latter was rigid and colourless, and on his forehead big drops of cold sweat gathered, broke and blended together, and trickled down his face. The judge turned to the woman again, and said, in a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of Shakespearean drama is, in fact, deemed by the manager to be inadequate to satisfy the necessary commercial purposes of the theatre. The average purveyor of public entertainment reckons Shakespeare's plays among tasteless and colourless commodities, which only become marketable when they are reinforced by the independent arts of music and painting. Shakespeare's words must be spoken to musical accompaniments specially prepared for the occasion. Pictorial tableaux, ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... contradiction is easily explained. The study of nature, as it was carried on in the Renaissance, comprised the study of effects which had remained unnoticed by Antiquity; and the study of the statue,—colourless, without light, shade, or perspective, hampered, and was hampered by, the study of colour, of light and shade, of perspective, and of all that a generation of painters would seek to learn from nature. Nor was this all; the influence of the civilization of the Renaissance, of a civilization ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... were at tea that afternoon that Mrs. Ascher put in an appearance for the first time. She was a tall, lean woman, with dark red hair—Gorman called it bronze—and narrow eyes which never seemed quite open. Her face was nearly colourless. I was inclined to attribute this to her long suffering from seasickness, but when I got to know her better I found out that she is never anything but pallid, even when she has lived for months on land and has been ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... says that, while they were off the coast of Spain, Mr Banks and Dr Solander, the naturalists, had an opportunity of observing some very curious marine animals, some of which were like jelly, and so colourless that it was difficult to see them in the water except at night, when they became luminous, and glowed like pale liquid fire. One, that was carefully examined, was about three inches long, and an inch thick, with a hollow passing ...
— The Cannibal Islands - Captain Cook's Adventure in the South Seas • R.M. Ballantyne
... Such reduced to a colourless and abstract statement is the theme dealt with in Pauline. The young poet, who, through a fading autumn evening, lies upon his death-bed, has been faithless to his high calling, and yet never wholly faithless. As the pallid ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... kept her birds, and still peering through her gold-rimmed glasses, she examined their seed-troughs and water-glasses, and, having satisfied herself as to their state, she entered the drawing-room. There is little in this room; no pictures relieve the widths of grey colourless wall paper, and the sombre oak floor is spaced with a few pieces of furniture—heavy furniture enshrouded in grey linen cloths. Three French cabinets, gaudy with vile veneer and bright brass, are nailed against the walls, and the empty room is reflected dismally in the great gold mirror which faces ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... the Academie, that he has proved the chlorophyll, or resinous green colouring-matter of plants, to be 'a mixture of a perfectly colourless fat, capable of crystallising, and of a colouring principle which presents the greatest analogies with the red colouring principle of the blood, but which has never yet been obtained in a perfectly pure state.' He has isolated a quantity for experiment and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... bred such a breed; nor had Scandinavia. They were not blonds. They were not brunettes. Nor were they of the Brown, or Black, or Yellow. Their skin was white under a bronze of weather. Wet as was their hair, it was plainly a colourless, sandy hair. Yet their eyes were dark—and yet not dark. They were neither blue, nor gray, nor green, nor hazel. Nor were they black. They were topaz, pale topaz; and they gleamed and dreamed like the eyes ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... last, barely audible; and as she spoke stepped out into the broken shade of the cypress trees. She went a few paces away from me—then came slowly back and stood before me. Her face was quite colourless, but there was that in her eyes that brings ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... is little to be said. For all the wealth of detail that Statius has lavished on them, they are featureless. Adrastus is a colourless and respectable old king, strongly reminiscent of Latinus. Capaneus and Hippomedon are terrific warriors of gigantic stature and truculent speech, but they are wholly uninteresting. Argia and Jocasta are too rhetorical, ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... is akin to the worm. The myth of Psyche and the idea that we possess souls arose simply out of the contemplation of colour by some primitive sensitive. Very delicately coloured young girls were responsible for the legend, but humanity in the bulk is colourless and therefore soulless. Large public gatherings fill me with intense personal disgust. From Nelson's point of view, a popular demonstration in Trafalgar Square must unpleasantly resemble a box ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... is interesting to note the superior gusto with which the Eastern, as well as the Western tale-teller describes his scoundrels and villains whilst his good men and women are mostly colourless and unpicturesque. So Satan is the true hero of Paradise-Lost and by his side God and man are very ordinary; and Mephistopheles is much better society than ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... "Joel" he had not used for so many years that now, after six months' familiarity with it on his sister's lips, he could not get accustomed to it. The colourless and non-committal style of "J. S. Thorpe," under which he had lived so long, had been well enough for the term of his exile—the weary time of obscure toil and suspense. But now, in this sunburst of smiling fortune, when he had achieved the right to a name of distinction—here it was ready ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... more shining qualities of his wife. A line of description is too long for him. Indeed, I can think of no single word brief enough, at least in English. The Latin "nil" will do, since no language is rich in words of less than three letters. He is nice, kind, bald, timid, thin, and so colourless that he can scarcely be discerned save in a strong light. When Mrs. Heaven goes out into the orchard in search of him, I can hardly help calling from my window, "Bear a trifle to the right, Mrs. Heaven—now to the left—just in front of you now—if you put out ...
— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... of black velvet, was such as would be the ordinary wear of an elderly man of good position; but the face, a fine aquiline one, as to feature, was of perfectly absolute whiteness, scarcely relieved by the thin pale lips, or the eyes, which, naturally of a light-grey, had become almost as colourless as the rest of the face, and Betty felt a shock as if she had seen a marble statue clothed and ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his quenched eyes on her. "From gutter to hospital, from hospital to sanitarium, from sanitarium to ship," he said in a colourless ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... winds of heaven: "breathe on it gently." Ye showers descend on my Snowdrop with the tenderness of dew. Little flower, I love thy look of unpretending innocence: thou art the child of simplicity. Thou art a flower, even though colourless. Wert thou never gay as others? Where are the hues thou once didst wear? Hast thou lent them to the rainbow, or to gay and gaudy flowers, or why so pale? Dost thou fear the winter's wind? Canst thou survive the snow-storm? ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... "ostridges" and "pearlies," that used to break the monotony like the exchange of men's and women's hats, are thought to be declining. America may rival that dulness, but in no other country of Europe, to say nothing of the East and Africa, could so colourless a crowd be seen—a mass of people so devoid of character in costume, or of tradition and ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... lovely little face looked white and transparent as alabaster, the brown eyes seemed bigger and more wistful, the golden curls had grown, and framed the pale cheeks like a saint's halo, the small hands folded on the shabby rug were thin and colourless. The child was wasted almost to a shadow, and the blue veins on his forehead showed prominently. He recognized Dona at once, and for a moment a beautiful rosy flush flooded his ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... serious face showed clear and pale in the twilight. From the high forehead, under the girlish fringe of fair hair, to the thin, firm lips, which were too straight and colourless for beauty, it was the face of a woman who could feel strongly, but whose affections would never blur the definite forms or outlines of life. She looked out upon the world with level, dispassionate eyes in which there ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... once, the difference swept upon him. She was like Josephine as he had seen her in that hour of calm despair when she had come to him at the canoe. Home-coming had not brought her happiness. Her face was colourless, her cheeks slightly hollowed, in her eyes he saw now the lustreless glow which frequently comes with a fatal sickness. He was smiling and holding out his hand to her even as he saw these things, and at his side he heard ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... of him by an arm, and turned him on his back. His face was colourless, and the life seemed to ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... garlands of fairies, now near, and showing as lovely women, with every ornament of graceful dress—the elite of the county danced on, little caring whose eyes gazed and were dazzled. Outside all was cold, and colourless, and uniform, one coating of snow over all. But inside it was warm, and glowing, and vivid; flowers scented the air, and wreathed the head, and rested on the bosom, as if it were midsummer. Bright ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... doolie down and gone off to plunder; that he was in great pain, and wished to be taken to the hospital. He was lying on his back, no wound was visible, and but for the pallor of his face, always colourless, there was no sign of the agony he must have been enduring. On my expressing a hope that he was not seriously wounded, he said: 'I am dying; there is no chance for me.' The sight of that great man lying helpless and on the point of ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... Spenser, others who place Sterne, Voltaire, and Byron before both, and not a few who have emerged with profit and without pollution from the perusal of the labours of Rabelais and Aretino. There is a literal deluge of moral and colourless works, on the contrary, from which even the average modern reader comes away only with an uncomfortable sense of waste ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt |
